Personal information manager (PIM) applications generally provide email, contacts, and calendar management to users of personal computers. However, as a part of an enterprise-wide office suite installation, the PIM may provide a centralized portal to business information and processes including communications, people, events, and business data. The PIM can aggregate and consolidate data across the enterprise from various business applications such as accounting, time management, sales, budgeting and forecasting, and executive management systems. In order to perform these functions and provide access to this data, the PIM must be customizable, allowing modification of the user interface of the PIM to expose the data from the various systems and adapt the PIM functionality to conform to the business processes of the enterprise.
While many PIM applications provide customization features, the customizations are often maintained through proprietary tools and user interfaces designed for the end-user of the PIM. This makes customizations by software developers difficult to implement and deploy throughout the organization. The proprietary nature of the PIM customizations may also prevent the data from being exposed in a consistent fashion across the applications of the enterprise-wide office suite. In addition, if a new version of the PIM application is deployed to end-users, any customizations made may be difficult to incorporate in the new PIM software.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.